by Kelly Trickett

Created on: July 05, 2009   Last Updated: July 06, 2009

Every day so far this summer, Timothy had walked the half mile between his house and the corner pharmacy to get his daily ice cream cone. He would leave his house at around 12:30 in the afternoon after choking down the "nutritious" lunch his mother insisted he eat before being allowed to have something that tasted good. Honestly, Timothy would always think, who in the world could really like a tofu-cucumber melt sandwich? Yech. But choke it down he would, because the ice cream was delicious and the walk and time away from the boring routine of summer at home was worth any price.

Every day Timothy would walk past the same houses and yards, most of which stood empty at that time of the day, waiting for their owners to return from work. Some of them had kids playing in the yard, the same ones day after day, and some had dogs that would bark every time he passed by. The sameness was reassuring to Timothy, although every now and then someone Timothy didn't recognize had taken the day off and was working in the yard, and that was always interesting, too.

One house in particular always caught Timothy's attention. It had a white picket fence around it, the kind that always sounded so satisfying when you walked along dragging a stick across it. It had a little latched gate, made out of the same white pickets and rounded at the top. The pickets, satisfying sounds though they made, were not what always caught Timothy's attention. It was the gate.

Right below where the pickets rounded up, there hung on the gate the kind of knocker that should be on a front door. This knocker, however, was different from any knocker Timothy had ever seen. It was a fat, wide-mouthed gargoyle's face, which was cool enough for any boy, but even more fascinating was that every day when Timothy walked by, the expression on the doorknocker's face would be different. Sometimes it would be gleefully grinning, other times it would have a stormy, angry look on its face; still others it would look as if its best friend in the whole world had just died and it was on the verge of weeping.

Nobody else seemed to notice the changing expressions of this gate knocker, and when Timothy mentioned it to someone else, they always either looked at him like he was crazy or told him he must be imagining it.

Some people, upon being faced with a doorknocker that change expression, especially when the expressions were on the face

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